Leslie Thornton

Thornton’s short films combine original and archival footage, video and still images, and digital media in their investigation of the collision (and collusion) of these modes. The play that she exercises between abstract and referential imagery allows her to address moral and ethical issues as they pertain to events and as they relate to the role of art and media…

a painter turned video- and filmmaker who teaches in the Modern Culture and Media Program at Brown University. Her lush, complex works explore the mechanisms of desire and meaning, while probing past the boundaries of language and narrative conventions…

Her Films

The Girls Without the Camera in Their Heads

Adynata is a figure of speech, a form of hyperbole that has been exaggerated to the point of impossibility. Similarly, Leslie Thornton’s seminal film, Adynata is also a densely assembled rhetoric: an exposition into the social representations of a perpetuated, exoticized otherness – an alien culture, an irretrievable past, an impenetrable psyche – a conjured idealization collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity and irreconcilable contradiction…